UPEI - BUS442.0

Chris Andersen’s Wired post really made me think. What exactly these days constitutes free? In my honest opinion, everything has a price, whether are not you are paying it directly or not.

It cannot be denied, the web is in a sense a commercialized gateway to the entire world. If you take the ability to make money off the world wide web, it falls apart. While many of us use services like Google or Gmail daily for free, SOMEONE out there in cyberspace is paying for our usage. It is the advertisers on Google that make it successful. If there are no advertisements, there is no income, and if there is no income, there is no money. If they have no money they can’t operate, and Google is dead. It isn’t free to run that company, their computing and intellectual resources cost millions of dollars yearly.

Google is a fantastic example. Likely millions of people use it daily, yet no one pays for the right to use it. For us, it is free, but that is just a benefit most of us take for granted in this Web 2.0 world we live in. We as a society need online commerce and business just as much as the companies who run the sites need it to reach their financial goals, because really these sites MAKE the world wide web what it is today.

In terms of consumer products available for free online, I am still sticking by my title of this post: Nothing is free these days. Personally, I think you can think of it in two ways:

1. You are either paying shipping costs or some membership fee of some sort.
2. Even in the case like the free ebook from Oprah, many are likely to continue buying this authors works.

Those are two examples I can think of. I think in 90% of all cases, if you get something “free” you really are paying for it someway or somehow.

My personal favorite example of this are the “pyramid” free iPod deals. Sure at the end of the day you may get an iPod you didn’t pay for, but at what cost? You likely had to sign up for a few offers that had to pay for, then you had to recruit friends to do the same. The companies who you signed up for paid for it. Like my previous Google example, “It’s not free, someone else paid for it.”

The Internet is intriguing in that sense. Overall, it seems free. You could entertain yourself for days and not pay for it, but like i’ve said countless times in this post “Nothing is really free.”

-dc

I was just going through Google’s site and I came across some interesting stuff. Most notably I think their 411 service is very impressive. All these years I kind of always wondered what the point was to have such a thorough index of companies in their Google Maps system. If you ever noticed in Google Maps, you can search for places such as Pizza places and it will find you the closest one.

I think Google does a very good job at using their existing technologies to implement new ones. While Google 411 (1-800-GOOG-411) still has some bugs to work out (No canadian service, business listings only) I think it is a really intriguing concept. For the first time, Google has developed a service that doesn’t compete with traditional online companies. If they can perfect this, it will pose a major threat to telephone company directory assistance because it is free and it’s more intelligent than the 411 that we have today. Google’s service lets you find companies by category as well. In the future they could also integrate this with the GPS that is in cell phones already to make the service even better, but I doubt this will happen since privacy is a major issue here.

I think Google has already conquered the online world, not many people can deny that. I think that since they have done mostly everything there is to do online, they will move to more “offline” products and services. They already have the brand recognition, resources to develop new products and services and not to mention a team of the worlds best engineers at their disposal. I believe they are moving now towards Mobile technologies. One example is their Mobile Product search, which allows you to search products for sale on your cell. They are also developing their own open source mobile OS called Android, which I have previously made a post about .

Hi Everyone,My name is Dave Canvin. I am from Charlottetown, P.E.I. and am currently finishing up my last semester of my BBA here at UPEI. In the future I hope to attend law school or perhaps take my masters in business. My hobbies include sports (especially golf and basketball), and messing around with computers and technology. I confess that I am a Facebook addict, and I rely heavily on the computer for emailing, listening to music, and watching movies and stuff like that. I am taking this course because technology has always fascinated me, and I like to see how it will be implemented in business further in the future.I started using Google Reader yesterday and I must admit it is a pretty impressive way to view content on the Internet. I presently have it set up with feeds from my favorite sports teams: the Montreal Canadiens, New England Patriots, and the Pheonix Suns, and also CISHoops.ca, a Canadian basketball blog I visit. It is a pretty neat way to keep up to date with current events and I look forward to using it more this semester.